Don't confuse price with value. A corporation is worth the discounted present value of all the dividends it will ever pay. That figure may not be knowable, but it does exist and in this fevered dream world can safely be assumed to be zero for almost everyone. The price, however, can be pretty much anything, reflecting what at least one person is willing and able to pay for it.
> A corporation is worth the discounted present value of all the dividends it will ever pay.
Only if you can't cash out at the higher price first :), but joking aside I think your point is an important one that gets overlooked a lot when people talk about tech companies.
It'd probably be a bit more than zero. You can buy the company, fire all the engineers, set the price to $10 per user immediately, watch 95% of users leave, remaining 5% paying $10 per year, and then discount and sum over that cash-flow, and you could probably end up with a value of several hundred thousand dollars in the minimum.
Unlike switching VM's or databases, switching from one front-end for a pseudo-irc-client to another is essentially simple, the migration is probably significantly less painful, there are no proprietary formats in the way (.pdf .dwg).
The actual costs / complexity involved in building a similar product are magnitudes less than the high valuation would suggest.
So I'm not sure how much early success is really worth in this market.
Are they better than their competitors? In what way?
I've been using Slack in a pretty casual way recently as my company switched to it. It seems, you know... fine. Like it has the same features that all the other messaging products have. What's the compelling feature of Slack?
They're not. Between Slack and HipChat it's a wash. Both work reasonably well and have their own quirks. I'm more cognizant of Slack's quirks at the moment, because that's what I currently use. For instance, most URLs don't work on iOS Slack, because ampersands get HTML escaped into &. I sent feedback, and someone quickly responds that they know about and they intend to fix it.
As a hipchat using company, we got a slack account to give it a test drive, and I was ... surprised how much of a wash it is vs hipchat.
I had a "this is what all the fuss is about?" reaction.
I actually seem to prefer the hipchat UI personally, and apparently so do many of my colleagues. The fact that hipchat is cheaper only made it clearer to us.
note: only using and comparing the osx desktop app for both services.
Actually, it sounds small, but the biggest advantage of HipChat over Slack is that HipChat allows you to change the background color of bot messages (like incoming exceptions, deploys, etc.). It is incredibly frustrating that Slack can't allocate an engineer to just do this. Slack's custom message styling options are virtually nonexistent. Yeah, yeah, I know we programmers shouldn't say "it will only take a few minutes," but come on!
I've used both and currently use slack. I prefer the simple ui of hipchat to slack for sure.
In my area slack seems to be becoming the more popular chat tool but maybe I just have too small of a pool to be accurate.
Slack executes so much better at every level that stating it's a wash between Slack and HipChat just doesn't compute.
One key example is the multiple teams feature: the ability to have multiple accounts logged in at the same time, and the ability to easily swipe between them on iOS or toggle on desktop is a huge advantage.
A quick look at HipChat indicates this still isn't possible [1].
Considering more and more people wear different startup / company / organisation hats not having this feature is a great way to limit participation / growth in a communications platform.
That Slack had this feature at the outset for me meant I've already spread use of Slack to multiple orgs and participate in all of them at the same time.
Nonsense. Slack is very beautiful with everything around the core feature, but the core feature is awful. The main chat window wastes incredible amounts of space, even in the compressed mode. The least visible items on the screen (apart from timestamps) are the chat messages from users - instead their names, icons, channel names, navigation elements are HUGE. Cute niceties like emotes are screwy due to the standard layout. We're using the Jira integration, and it wastes so much space that one entire page is taken up by a mere 3 Jira ticket updates. Stick it into 'compressed' mode and now every chat line starts at a different point, depending on the user name. Hipchat has none of the problems I've listed here, though it has it's own - generally they're issues outside the core feature.
For people used to chat elsewhere, these issues are pretty obvious. But Slack seems to be marketing to people who've never used chat, so they get to set their expectations from scratch.
> Nonsense. Slack is very beautiful with everything around the core feature, but the core feature is awful...
Well obviously we disagree on this point, as to me something being beautiful necessarily has to encompass the UX, and I think the Slack UX is great.
As a previous long-time Jira / Confluence user I also know about atrocious UX, and Atlassian delivers that in spades (along with appallingly slow page refreshes). If you've been sensitised to the kind of UX Atlassian delivers I'm really surprised you take issue with Slack, but each to their own.
> For people used to chat elsewhere, these issues are pretty obvious. But Slack seems to be marketing to people who've never used chat, so they get to set their expectations from scratch.
Our team are long-time IRC users and have used a lot of comms solutions over the years, and Slack is the first decent one we've come across.
So I'd obviously refute your assertion that savvy users dislike Slack and unsophisticated users like Slack.
Jira/Confluence UI is not even vaguely Hipchat UI. And yes, Confluence is appallingly slow. I find it weird that you mention these as a rebuttal, since a) they're not chat, and b) the only mention I made of either of them is how Slack presents one of them. Hell, I didn't even mention any other chat products, not even IRC, just 'chat' as a general term.
Our team are also longterm IRC users (I get mocked for only being in half-a-dozen channels) and our Slack experiment lasted only one afternoon before everyone abandoned it. The only dev who was really fighting for Slack was wanting to use their IRC integration and bypass the UI completely.
So I'd obviously refute your assertion that savvy users dislike Slack and unsophisticated users like Slack.
Refute away, because that's not what I said. Your entire rebuttal to what I said has been a strawman, apart from 'we disagree'. I gave you some very concrete examples of my problems with the Slack interface, and you give me a vague dismissal about entirely different products.
I really liked it immediately upon using it, that almost never happens to me. If you want a feature checklist I'm afraid I won't be reciting one. It's well designed in my opinion, I care about that a lot. Other productivity tools like JIRA and Jive are awful, I enjoy using Slack.
But if you're right, it's no good and there's no switching costs, then I guess they'll die. Right?
You're ascribing agenda to me that's not there -- and maybe conflating me with my GP poster. I'm asking an honest question. I don't dislike Slack and I'm open to there being something that they genuinely do really well, I just haven't noticed such a thing as a casual user.
I've only used Slack, not some of the alternatives like HipChat, and I really like it. I'd be interested in hearing about how some of the competitors stack up feature-wise
We just left HipChat for Slack and love it. The file sharing includes previews, the drag and drop to upload immediately is great. Search includes the content of uploaded files. Search on HipChat is a joke, IMO. It's more fun to use, and more intuitive for non-technical people.
It's not an advantage in features, it's just that little bit more polished than everything else. Everything works, and works how you'd expect it to. The UI subtly guides you towards doing the right thing. There's nothing you can't do in other clients, but everything's just that little bit better.
We also just switched from HipChat to Slack. We use JIRA and BitBucket, but had a difficult time with HipChat. It would sometimes drop messages and/or spontaneously disconnect.
I find it amusing whenever I drive by their Office Space bill board on the freeway and think to myself, "How many times will I have to send that memo through HipChat before the message gets through?"
Do you find them that much better? We're a small HipChat-using company who moved three teams over for a month, and the communal response was "eh?". It's no-doubt prettier and easier to write integrations, but for the core competency of chatting, the two were very similar (and most people preferred the native HipChat apps to the Slack browser one). It's big selling point for us was integration with Google Docs, and in testing we found that it didn't work that well.
It's also 3.5x more expensive. In absolute terms that's not much (<$400 a month), but no one could point to $400 of incremental value in it. If we fully embraced it and turned off emails for those teams, would we see it? Maybe, but we'd still need emails to deal with external vendors, and there's no way that we'd get non-developers to see it as an email replacement.
They are trying to replace all of corporate internal communication channels which includes email so there is some merit to it. While cost of switching is low for a smaller company, it is extremely high for larger corporation especially if they use all sorts of integrations with other products within slack. The more integrations they have the harder it is for competing product to catch up in larger corporations market, which probably provide most of the revenue for the product.
I agree that the switching costs aren't technical. Maybe for small teams in a startup it's easy to relearn a new product, but don't underestimate the stickiness with large groups of people all using and relying on it. Just think about how many large (& small) organizations still use email even though it's terrible for intra company communication.
Don't underestimate the stickiness to small teams. We did switch to Slack from HipChat (which was fine) and we love Slack. I imagine a deal of disappointment among the 6 people in our company if we switched to something else - especially something almost Slack.
Slack is one of the first companies walking around with a billion dollar valuation that makes me go... "Yeah, maybe..." We use it. We love it. It's mature, well designed, gets improved constantly, and is used by more local businesses I know than not. It provides real, actual benefit to our small organization above and beyond what we pay for it.
Slack, to me, is a real product, with a real revenue stream and real value to teams. I really hope they never get bought and acquired or rolled in to a larger organization. The app is a constant joy to use - I can only say that about one other program I use daily.
Can you highlight a few of the reasons you love it, in comparison to HipChat? When we ended our trial month and announced we were going back to HipChat, the biggest reactions was "OK".
Multi-team support is a big one. HipChat doesn't let you participate in multiple organizations. When you're doing B2B stuff, or contracting work, or just interfacing with some external team (eg., designers), being able to chat in the same room without having to jump through a bunch of hoops is super important.
For me, there is also a bunch of minor detail where Slack wins. Slack just looks better, behaves better with choppy connections, and has better code pasting support. It also does much better with automatic link extraction (HipChat's Linky is annoying and won't let you remove the automatic description). Lastly, Slack has integration playbooks that automatically uses APIs to configure stuff or (when that's not possible) gives you the recipe; for example, the Github and Zendesk integrations will automatically register the app and webhooks for you, almost no manual setup needed. HipChat is all manual.
And for the love of God, HipChat, fix your inane emojis. Immature 4Chan memes (trollface etc.) have no place in a business, not even among developers.
The only way I can make sense of it is using logic similar to [this][1]. If I assume VC's consider slack a "force multiplier" for startups, then I can see it raising investments far above the value it provides when viewed standalone.
The fact that they already have a popular competitor in the space (hipchat) would normally make such a high valuation seemingly more confusing, but if viewed using the force multiplier logic, maybe less so? There could be concern that having only a single frequently used tool would make it too easy for someone to "own" a startup's lifeblood, so better to have more than one. (similar to github and bitbucket?)
I guess the alternative is that slack has some investor specific info about their product pipline where they are pitching other companion tools that work well together, and/or compete more directly with other popular services. Like atlassian/jira or something.
Switching databases is significantly more painful for a _small_ portion of an organization. Getting a large organization to switch messaging platforms across all team functions probably wouldn't be a seamless as you'd like to imagine.
Indeed. It took us about 4 years after officially switching from AIM to Skype to kill AIM, and then with Gtalk/Hangouts we're just now starting to try to kill Skype.
Incredibly true; for something as simple and necessary as messaging, the company I work for has:
1. A company-wide and approved solution (proprietary) that's very buggy.
2. A jabber server someone threw together so everyone could use their client or choice.
3. Google chat (through various clients).
4. MSN messenger / Skype.
And they all get used by different people for different things. It's very frustrating. Switching to a new thing would be a non-starter, probably (and we couldn't move to Slack anyway, but that's another issue).
Even at a 100 person company I knew, half the organization used gchat and half used jabber/webex connect. Each side had champions that spent a ridiculous amount of time trying to convert everyone to one platform, and last I checked they still hadn't succeeded.
There are gui clients that support both protocols (i.e. I think Pidgin does) - why not just write a plugin that allows to cross-communicate between the two?
As time goes on I get more and more disillusioned with solutions that begin with "why not just write".
Nothing excites me more than having to think about supporting yet another codebase deployed to non-technical people who will undoubtedly cause more bugs than thought possible and open more JIRA tickets about it with increasingly vague title names.
At some point Slack or [integration of choice] is cheaper than having an internal engineering team to write half-baked communication solutions.
> "I don’t feel like there are any serious vulnerabilities in the business."
No one in technology should ever find themselves uttering these words. It's like asking for it.
If the tech world remains relatively unchanged Slack is easily worth $3 billion. All they need to do is get a few million workers on there chatting away and they've got ~$10/month * millions, which is hundreds of millions per year.
They should probably sell to Microsoft and let them take on the risk at this point. There's a good chance the tech world will change around them and the whole thing will come tumbling back down to earth. Or they could try to become the new Microsoft.
After seeing what happened to Flickr (both the product and the team) after Yahoo bought it, combined with Slack's crazy growth, makes me think a sale is unlikely. Especially to a big company like MS.
I disagree about the MS part. I think Slack would probably do very well there. The enterprise market is where Slack is going, and MS is fully entrenched there. They also have a very developer-centric culture that some people enjoy.
I don't necessarily see why MS would purchase Slack instead of delivering their own solution. Unlike Skype it's not really key to have a large-user base on the service, all that matters is that your entire business is running the same solution - and Microsoft already makes and sells other related enterprise tools which gives them an advantage both in terms of sales and integration. Perhaps it's even more surprising that they haven't already delivered a competing solution.
Yammer is a team communication solution Microsoft already bought, but is way worse at synchronous communication (chat) than Slack, but also better at at asynchronous communication (threaded conversation, like on Facebook).
Microsoft would want to buy Slack for the same reason they spent $$$ on best-in-class products like Yammer, Sunrise, rebranding Acompli as Outlook. Slack's revenue is incredible for a startup, but a drop in the bucket for MSFT (for now). More immediately, Slack represents an entry point for Microsoft to upsell Slack's customers to other Office365 services and Azure services.
I didn't realize that the Slack CEO was also the Flickr founder, so you might be right in that Slack just isn't for sale to a megacorp.
But Microsoft is the most likely buyer, it's been on a spree with integrating best-in-class enterprise products/productivity tools into Office 365 (Sunrise, Accompli, previously Yammer). Slack fits into that mold, though the sale price would probably be orders of magnitude higher than those acquisitions (likely upwards of $10 billion, possibly much more). At that price tag, it might be untenable.
Not sure what Slack's medium-longer terms goals are, honestly. Their valuation is so high that only megacorps can afford them, but there's still enough risk that public markets might be skeptical (their revenue growth is astronomical, but they haven't been generating revenue for THAT long). In the interview, Stewart mentioned market saturation eventually limiting their crazy growth numbers, but I'd imagine they have a ways to go, given that the total enterprise market has to be well more than 200,000 total seats. Exciting times for them.
IME there's quite a bit of overlap with Yammer (they pitch themselves differently but the actual use case is very similar), which was a high-profile recent MS acquisition.
I heard third hand that Tiny Speck was re-using the server infrastructure that they developed for Glitch in their next (at the time) secret project.
To what extend that's literally true or it's just that he's just working with some of the same people and tools, I don't know, but it would certainly make sense.
In much the same way Slack rose from the ashes of Glitch, Flickr did from Game Neverending, the predecessor to Glitch.
>Although development of the game was later shutdown in 2004, the tools built for GNE later evolved into Flickr, a widely-hailed photo-sharing service. Occasional signs of this legacy are visible, such as the '.gne' file extension appearing in Flickr's URLs.
>Whether or not the next venture is based around imaging services, it looks like it will have a social element: “We have developed some unique messaging technology with applications outside of the gaming world and a smaller core team will be working to develop new products,” he writes.
I'm having a bit of trouble buying the growth story. 750k users on a messaging service is small. And the service has been going for at least 20 months and the company much longer.
750k users on a free messaging service is indeed small. Slack is a paid messaging service and that's a whole other valuation. Slack generates more revenue than Whatsapp for example, despite being itty bitty in comparison of user base.
Pretty sure WhatsApp makes more money than Slack. It made $15m in first 6 months of 2014. In theory it's on track to make 100s of millions of $ per year with the $1/year fee. Slack might make $1-2m/month with the 200k paying customers.
Yeah, the only number that impresses me there is the proportion of paying vs non-paying users which seems on the high side for a freemium product.
200k users could be achieved by signing up 3 or 4 megacorps (obviously at enterprise rates far lower than $10 per user) and having a business on that scale that doesn't make you a unicorn, even if you have a decent product and profitable business model. In fairness to Slack, the revenue run rates not mentioned in the article are more impressive, though I haven't seen how much they're spending to acquire those users.
Skype had well over 50x the user base of Slack - achieved over a similar timescale - when they sold for a similar valuation back in 2005. Frankly, I was far more impressed with how circumspect Butterfield was about his startup's prospects than the growth figures.
> There's a good chance the tech world will change around them and the whole thing will come tumbling back down to earth.
What supports this claim? Yes tech and the tech world changes quickly but some of the core functions of running a business, such as effective team communication, will not go away any time soon.
There have been many before them, see Flowdock, Campfire, IRC, going back as long as we've had the Internet. What sets Slack apart is they've executed it better than anyone. They took the industry by storm overnight, it seems.
That's an important clarification. Most people think execution is the inherent quality of the product. Obviously execution is having the correct people involved to open doors.
With the right people getting involved I am talking about the investors. That has nothing to do with execution but to do with access to distribution and press.
Have you actually used Slack? Where I currently work, we have gone through two other chat products in the past two years: Campfire followed by Flowdock. They all fizzled out and died - people just stopped using them for some reason.
Then we tried Slack, and it's the first time the entire team has adopted 100% and maintained it. Slack mobile has even replaced text messaging/GroupMe for a lot of us as well.
Don't hand-wave away their success by giving credit to investors. It makes you sound bitter and insecure, or at least uninformed. They've done a great job building their product and deserve the position they're in. Whether or not $2.8B is an accurate valuation is beyond me, but it does seem like they're minting money over there.
I have not only used slack i am running a 600 people channel, use it for work plus several side projects. I am a huge proponent of Slack and I have used them since very early on. I am not disputing the quality of the App.
But it's not just an execution game as many would like to claim.
Campfire and Flowdock are both pretty awful compared to Hipchat (the previous market leader) and Slack. I think Hipchat is feature-wise mostly on par with Slack, but has a much more approachable interface. Hipchat is also learning from slack on how to make integrations easier to install and configure. Slack surged into the space by marketing to companies that were using nothing - not by winning people away from competitors. I'm not sure that Hipchat can take the space back from slack without a major new killer feature, but Slack's marketshare is hardly guaranteed.
So you're making my argument for me: you don't believe in Slack's longevity because they're satisfying a permanent need. You believe in it because it executed well.
Nothing prevents anyone else from executing better. The permanence of the need doesn't point, in any way, to the permanence of this particular supply.
I agree with artursapek. Part of their success comes from better execution, many in the enterprise space are starting to argue that superior design for end-users is more important than ever (https://twitter.com/levie/status/586265289748307969), and also the market is dramatically expanding as we speak as more teams are working remotely than ever before, caused by a variety of technological breakthroughs. Part of Slack is execution, another part is timing.
I suspect the MSN generation is only just reaching a level where they can make purchasing decisions. Good technical companies have been using slack-like systems for years, but traditional companies are... conservative.
Using multiple devices became mainstream; nowadays everyone needs to be able to use your system from their phone and their computer at the same time. This shouldn't be hard to handle but through accidents of history it's terrible on the big open-source options (Jabber or IRC). And companies need internally-hosted. If AOL had been willing to make a self-hosted AIM, or MS a self-hosted Skype, they would've killed it.
I'm not sure why they didn't. And I'm not sure why Atlassian didn't seize the whole market with HipChat, which is almost identical to Slack (it's very marginally less polished). At my current company we use Slack's free tier because we fit within the usage limits for that but not those for HipChat, so maybe it's that?
Do that many people really have work phones that are mobile devices? I've had a desk phone at several jobs, which I pretty much never use, but I was only issued a mobile device as work phone once. I never really used it either. Yet people talk about this as though it is a common thing. Is there some specific industry or type of job that routinely gives people mobile devices for work use?
It's more that tech people are willing to use company chat outside of work. At a minimum slack is very handy for "I'll be late in today" from the train, and I don't mind using my personal phone for that.
> such as effective team communication, will not go away any time soon.
Communication itself won't go away, but that doesn't imply that a platform/application which facilitates communication won't fade away. Just ask IRC, ICQ and AIM (All of which are still in active use today)
>No one in technology should ever find themselves uttering these words. It's like asking for it.
It's a completely different matter to be saying the same words in private vs in a public interview that will be read by millions of readers. A CEO must say this (or something to the general effect while being PC) when speaking in public. Doing otherwise can only have negative consequences with respect to employees, customers, etc.
especially something in this space, a communication platform. even if you completely exclude the chances that your sofware will ever be less than perfect... who knows what messaging platform will evolve into your space and when one will find the keys to network effects that eat your lunch.
Yeah, people are focusing too much on slack in particular and less on what the interview reveals about how VC and the tech industry actually operates. I'm really impressed by the way this guy thinks. These are things I haven't heard from other people.
My team just gave up on Slack today, because push notifications seem too unreliable when we're on our phones. Paradoxically, we've found it works better when the app is not running than it does when it is running. Most of us are using Android phones. I couldn't find anyone else having the same problem, and I couldn't find any answers googling around, other than the obvious "turn on push notifications"-- push notices were definitely on.
We may go back to Slack at some point, if we can get it to work effectively for us.
The assumption is that if you're actively in the channel, you saw the item already and don't need a duplication notification on your phone for the item you just read.
To expand on this, the desktop clients keep you active for much longer than say the web client. I was also having these issues so I asked for a clarification from their support.
I stopped using the desktop client for this reason and now I have a separate window open for the web client. Push works much better for me now.
What the other reply said is true, Slack by default only sends mobile notifications when you're 'away.' In addition, by default, it waits 5 minutes before sending notifications (this can be changed).
The v2 Android app is currently in beta - I've been testing it for several weeks. It's lightyears ahead of the current release version which is admittedly pretty faulty (no caching means that resumes are very slow). I've also found notifications to be more reliable. Perhaps give it another try once they ship the v2 Android app.
Slack's valuation will make a lot more sense once they delve into the video chat and conferencing world, making their way further into the enterprise.
People need to understand that investment is a vote of confidence in the team, not just the product. What can this team accomplish with that investment? That's the question.
Slack is one of those curious tools that seems to take off despite doing nothing particularly new or innovative. We started using it due to some colleagues who raved about it. I haven't come across a feature yet that we've used that hasn't been part of IM / IRC clients for more than 15 years. The main feature of it seems to be that it's new, so when you first start using it only the 5 other people that you are collaborating with right now are on there, so it starts off feeling more productive and focused than other tools.
But then, I thought the same thing about Twitter (how is this not worse that every other IRC / IM service I've ever used?) and look what happened there.
While you're right in a broad sense, I think in fairness slack has a lot of polish where others tools don't -- they get a lot of UX details right that seem "obvious" because they are getting them right. But they're actually far from trivial.
If you gist the snippet beforehand, the experience is almost identical. This is obviously an extra step, but then your snippet isn't 100% tied to Slack. I have an app installed that gists my clipboard with a keyboard shortcut, and copies the link to my clipboard, so it's just an extra key chord.
Eh, it gets the basic monospace-preserve-whitespace stuff right. It's good enough for me 99% of the time, and if it isn't, I normally want to be debugging somewhere other than a chat app.
What Slack does very well is giving a good enough experience for programmers to do shop-talk, and ample opportunities for chatbot yak-shaves, it's also perfectly well usable for non technical people. I work for $ENORMOCORP, and after a couple of brave pioneers among the tech people, now everyone's falling over themselves to get their teams a Slack instance. (As others have said here, the ability to have multiple instances is pretty fundamental to this dynamic - we have team-specific Slacks, product specific, project specific and what have you. I certainly would not want some more 'old fashioned' colleagues seeing that NSFW bollocks people keep wiring into the tech specific chatbots...)
This strikes me as a pattern with some potential for growth - tech people driving adoption among non-technical colleagues. I reserve judgement on whether that's $3bn worth of potential.
Honest question, outside of writing your own bot are there any real IRC integrations for even half of the services Slack integrates with? It's really useful to set up monitoring services in a dev channel where we can not only read errors, but share code snippets with pretty formatting, Github integration to let us know when a PR has been opened to fix the issue, and then Trello to manage features too.
Not to mention the integrations outside of developers. I haven't worked in enough large companies, and never as a nontechnical employee so I'm not sure what sales teams were using for communication but I doubt IRC was their cup of tea. I imagine they used a lot of email, maybe some CRM communication but that's still not as useful, or rather I imagine it's less useful than Slack. Having a single place to discuss Stripe purchases, hiring with Breezy, MailChimp et cetera that isn't a gigantic email forward sounds seriously useful and I don't know that anything like that exists on IRC.
There are alternatives like HipChat, but they clearly didn't it the mark the way Slack has.
You make a good point about all the integrations. I might be in an minority situation, but none of the people who are enamoured with Slack that I work with are using any of that stuff. It's just instant messaging with a sprinkle of file sharing to them. It seems to me the biggest thing, as others have pointed out, is the polish and the native apps. For example, Hangouts does most of it, but Google has killed of their native apps and the in-browser experience is really suboptimal. Having a simple, dedicated, well designed native app really makes a difference.
The problem with trying to kill email is that you're never going to have everyone migrate off of it. It's going to have to be some type of layer on top of IMAP that then moves to a more sophisticated protocol. Google has done such a great job with NLP/AI/ML that spam from facebook, twitter, etc. are all put into a separate tab that I only see when I want to. When I click on an email about a flight, it gives me updates on the status of the flight. Gmail also makes it seamless to share docs. I could make a clean interface for email groups using the Gmail API and have the same product as slack. What am I missing here?
Slack is really a nice application. People have been saying email overload is a problem for years, and Slack has really put a dent in it for work/office use. Yes it's a simple app, but so is email, and simple done better is genius.
Slack is good but it's nothing revolutionary that would merit the valuation. My main argument against their crazy valuation is that there's no lock in so it'd be easy for teams to move on to the "next big thing." Also, see http://getkaiwa.com/
Is it me or does Microsoft just need to get a decent persistent group chat in office365/lync/skype for business along with a decent api for integrations. As small business/startup running office 365 the reason we started with slack was due to the lack of persistent chat rooms in office365. (yammer is just not usable and not sure who it's aimed at!)
We recently switched from Hipchat to Slack and at first I hated it, now I'm only mildly disgruntled because I did a few modifications:
1. Bubble when I get a direct message.
2. Leave all but about 3-4 groups.
3. Tell images to not default display (have to click on them)
4. Star important channels (The star is next to the #channelname at the top and it's only visible when hovered) That big star on the top right is not to star a channel.
5. and probably most importantly was to switch to the compressed mode so all the chat spaces are as tightly compacted as possible.
I had my admin enable the IRC gateway and I just use that now. Uploaded files are a little awkward (but that's mostly because I have to switch between multiple google enterprise accounts during the course of a day).
Put the 'SLACK' user on ignore and most of the annoying integrations disappear.
cloudirc seem like a decent middle ground when tech ppl can use/setup irc incl. bots and integration s while others just use the web/mobile ui from irccloud.
also this way you own the data/service for the most part.
We switched from Hipchat (buggy in the beginning, smooth and ideal at the end) to Hall (a buggy, slow, awful mess) to Slack (also slow, but not buggy, and awful UX).
Hipchat gets notifications right. Slack and Hall seem to have (in)sane defaults, and not quite right customizations.
The web-view of Slack is slow and stupid.
It's picky, but I loved the vim/sed style substitutions in Hipchat. Slack FTL.
But the biggest annoyance by far: In Hipchat you could reorder your chats however you felt like. In Slack they're fixed. And team chats are arbitrarily (feeling) broken up into groups and channels. Which is a completely useless distinction for most I think.
Hipchat had @all and @here. Which seem pretty self explanatory. Slack has @group, @channel, and... I guess that's it. No version of @here AFAICT, and depending on what sort of "room" you're in, the @all equivalent changes.
The iOS app also makes something that looks like a room picker and instead makes it some other menu I forget. And notifications will happily occur on my laptop, computer, iPhone and iPad all at once if I don't catch it at my desk in time. Here's a hint: If you decide to notify my phone, don't notify anything else at that point. No cat picture or CI build notification deserves Def-Con 5 treatment.
But it has themes? And useless giphy integrations? Honestly I don't get the love at all. Form over function at it's worst. I really dislike it. :-p
Maybe our settings are set correctly, but HipChat's notifications seem half baked. I've been trying out Slack on another org, and I noticed the biggest issue in the way we use Slack is that most of our communication is person to person.
This seems to come about because any HipChat message to a room you are in notifies & alerts the whole room on OS X. Because of this, most communication happens in private person to person rooms which defeats the purpose of having public rooms for transparency. I haven't been able to get any of the rooms feature to stick and so what commonly happens is two people discuss things on chat, then repeat those conversations to everyone who should have been on it in meatspace.
All of this because HipChat still doesn't let you set per-room notifications.
Slack is a great product but I do not think it's worth $2.8B. Hipchat has a much bigger company behind it and people switched to Slack pretty quickly because for the most part it is a better product. The reason for that switch is because the cost of switch is relatively minimal. Any competitor can come in and take that away from Slack. They are only worth this much if the tech landscape is static, which we all know it isnt. Just my 2 cents.
There seems to be a booming market for Slack integrations lately. This is great because Slack just = text, and so building prototypes can be fairly easy. Our product (http://focusr.co) actually started purely as a Slack integration, and evolved into something else.
The value is not in the actual product, but in the lock-in that this solution creates. I find this outrageous, and I hope that soon a better and open chat/communication standard will emerge.
The funny thing is that Atlassian, whose HipChat had a few years lead on Slack, was only (?) valued at $3.3bn last year for their whole suite of products
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[ 194 ms ] story [ 3904 ms ] threadOnly if you can't cash out at the higher price first :), but joking aside I think your point is an important one that gets overlooked a lot when people talk about tech companies.
No no no. Those Aerons go for $50 each on Craigslist.
The actual costs / complexity involved in building a similar product are magnitudes less than the high valuation would suggest.
So I'm not sure how much early success is really worth in this market.
I've been using Slack in a pretty casual way recently as my company switched to it. It seems, you know... fine. Like it has the same features that all the other messaging products have. What's the compelling feature of Slack?
I had a "this is what all the fuss is about?" reaction.
I actually seem to prefer the hipchat UI personally, and apparently so do many of my colleagues. The fact that hipchat is cheaper only made it clearer to us.
note: only using and comparing the osx desktop app for both services.
One key example is the multiple teams feature: the ability to have multiple accounts logged in at the same time, and the ability to easily swipe between them on iOS or toggle on desktop is a huge advantage.
A quick look at HipChat indicates this still isn't possible [1].
Considering more and more people wear different startup / company / organisation hats not having this feature is a great way to limit participation / growth in a communications platform.
That Slack had this feature at the outset for me meant I've already spread use of Slack to multiple orgs and participate in all of them at the same time.
[1] https://help.hipchat.com/forums/138883-suggestions/suggestio...
Not currently possible, but officially confirmed as being worked on.
"It’s official: Development is underway for multiple account support in the HipChat clients. Stay tuned because updates are just around the corner."
Nonsense. Slack is very beautiful with everything around the core feature, but the core feature is awful. The main chat window wastes incredible amounts of space, even in the compressed mode. The least visible items on the screen (apart from timestamps) are the chat messages from users - instead their names, icons, channel names, navigation elements are HUGE. Cute niceties like emotes are screwy due to the standard layout. We're using the Jira integration, and it wastes so much space that one entire page is taken up by a mere 3 Jira ticket updates. Stick it into 'compressed' mode and now every chat line starts at a different point, depending on the user name. Hipchat has none of the problems I've listed here, though it has it's own - generally they're issues outside the core feature.
For people used to chat elsewhere, these issues are pretty obvious. But Slack seems to be marketing to people who've never used chat, so they get to set their expectations from scratch.
Well obviously we disagree on this point, as to me something being beautiful necessarily has to encompass the UX, and I think the Slack UX is great.
As a previous long-time Jira / Confluence user I also know about atrocious UX, and Atlassian delivers that in spades (along with appallingly slow page refreshes). If you've been sensitised to the kind of UX Atlassian delivers I'm really surprised you take issue with Slack, but each to their own.
> For people used to chat elsewhere, these issues are pretty obvious. But Slack seems to be marketing to people who've never used chat, so they get to set their expectations from scratch.
Our team are long-time IRC users and have used a lot of comms solutions over the years, and Slack is the first decent one we've come across.
So I'd obviously refute your assertion that savvy users dislike Slack and unsophisticated users like Slack.
Our team are also longterm IRC users (I get mocked for only being in half-a-dozen channels) and our Slack experiment lasted only one afternoon before everyone abandoned it. The only dev who was really fighting for Slack was wanting to use their IRC integration and bypass the UI completely.
So I'd obviously refute your assertion that savvy users dislike Slack and unsophisticated users like Slack.
Refute away, because that's not what I said. Your entire rebuttal to what I said has been a strawman, apart from 'we disagree'. I gave you some very concrete examples of my problems with the Slack interface, and you give me a vague dismissal about entirely different products.
But if you're right, it's no good and there's no switching costs, then I guess they'll die. Right?
I find it amusing whenever I drive by their Office Space bill board on the freeway and think to myself, "How many times will I have to send that memo through HipChat before the message gets through?"
It's also 3.5x more expensive. In absolute terms that's not much (<$400 a month), but no one could point to $400 of incremental value in it. If we fully embraced it and turned off emails for those teams, would we see it? Maybe, but we'd still need emails to deal with external vendors, and there's no way that we'd get non-developers to see it as an email replacement.
Slack is one of the first companies walking around with a billion dollar valuation that makes me go... "Yeah, maybe..." We use it. We love it. It's mature, well designed, gets improved constantly, and is used by more local businesses I know than not. It provides real, actual benefit to our small organization above and beyond what we pay for it.
Slack, to me, is a real product, with a real revenue stream and real value to teams. I really hope they never get bought and acquired or rolled in to a larger organization. The app is a constant joy to use - I can only say that about one other program I use daily.
For me, there is also a bunch of minor detail where Slack wins. Slack just looks better, behaves better with choppy connections, and has better code pasting support. It also does much better with automatic link extraction (HipChat's Linky is annoying and won't let you remove the automatic description). Lastly, Slack has integration playbooks that automatically uses APIs to configure stuff or (when that's not possible) gives you the recipe; for example, the Github and Zendesk integrations will automatically register the app and webhooks for you, almost no manual setup needed. HipChat is all manual.
And for the love of God, HipChat, fix your inane emojis. Immature 4Chan memes (trollface etc.) have no place in a business, not even among developers.
Oh, they do. E.g. to make fun of those trying to look sooo professional.
The fact that they already have a popular competitor in the space (hipchat) would normally make such a high valuation seemingly more confusing, but if viewed using the force multiplier logic, maybe less so? There could be concern that having only a single frequently used tool would make it too easy for someone to "own" a startup's lifeblood, so better to have more than one. (similar to github and bitbucket?)
I guess the alternative is that slack has some investor specific info about their product pipline where they are pitching other companion tools that work well together, and/or compete more directly with other popular services. Like atlassian/jira or something.
[1]: http://words.steveklabnik.com/is-npm-worth-26mm
1. A company-wide and approved solution (proprietary) that's very buggy.
2. A jabber server someone threw together so everyone could use their client or choice.
3. Google chat (through various clients).
4. MSN messenger / Skype.
And they all get used by different people for different things. It's very frustrating. Switching to a new thing would be a non-starter, probably (and we couldn't move to Slack anyway, but that's another issue).
Nothing excites me more than having to think about supporting yet another codebase deployed to non-technical people who will undoubtedly cause more bugs than thought possible and open more JIRA tickets about it with increasingly vague title names.
At some point Slack or [integration of choice] is cheaper than having an internal engineering team to write half-baked communication solutions.
Ui knowledge
Inertia
History.
The last is most important--if cultural knowledge over years gets embedded in slack, it will be easy to justify the modest ongoing costs.
No one in technology should ever find themselves uttering these words. It's like asking for it.
If the tech world remains relatively unchanged Slack is easily worth $3 billion. All they need to do is get a few million workers on there chatting away and they've got ~$10/month * millions, which is hundreds of millions per year.
They should probably sell to Microsoft and let them take on the risk at this point. There's a good chance the tech world will change around them and the whole thing will come tumbling back down to earth. Or they could try to become the new Microsoft.
Microsoft would want to buy Slack for the same reason they spent $$$ on best-in-class products like Yammer, Sunrise, rebranding Acompli as Outlook. Slack's revenue is incredible for a startup, but a drop in the bucket for MSFT (for now). More immediately, Slack represents an entry point for Microsoft to upsell Slack's customers to other Office365 services and Azure services.
But Microsoft is the most likely buyer, it's been on a spree with integrating best-in-class enterprise products/productivity tools into Office 365 (Sunrise, Accompli, previously Yammer). Slack fits into that mold, though the sale price would probably be orders of magnitude higher than those acquisitions (likely upwards of $10 billion, possibly much more). At that price tag, it might be untenable.
Not sure what Slack's medium-longer terms goals are, honestly. Their valuation is so high that only megacorps can afford them, but there's still enough risk that public markets might be skeptical (their revenue growth is astronomical, but they haven't been generating revenue for THAT long). In the interview, Stewart mentioned market saturation eventually limiting their crazy growth numbers, but I'd imagine they have a ways to go, given that the total enterprise market has to be well more than 200,000 total seats. Exciting times for them.
To what extend that's literally true or it's just that he's just working with some of the same people and tools, I don't know, but it would certainly make sense.
In much the same way Slack rose from the ashes of Glitch, Flickr did from Game Neverending, the predecessor to Glitch.
http://gaming.wikia.com/wiki/Game_Neverending
>Although development of the game was later shutdown in 2004, the tools built for GNE later evolved into Flickr, a widely-hailed photo-sharing service. Occasional signs of this legacy are visible, such as the '.gne' file extension appearing in Flickr's URLs.
http://techcrunch.com/2012/11/15/as-flickr-co-founder-butter...
>Whether or not the next venture is based around imaging services, it looks like it will have a social element: “We have developed some unique messaging technology with applications outside of the gaming world and a smaller core team will be working to develop new products,” he writes.
200k users could be achieved by signing up 3 or 4 megacorps (obviously at enterprise rates far lower than $10 per user) and having a business on that scale that doesn't make you a unicorn, even if you have a decent product and profitable business model. In fairness to Slack, the revenue run rates not mentioned in the article are more impressive, though I haven't seen how much they're spending to acquire those users.
Skype had well over 50x the user base of Slack - achieved over a similar timescale - when they sold for a similar valuation back in 2005. Frankly, I was far more impressed with how circumspect Butterfield was about his startup's prospects than the growth figures.
What supports this claim? Yes tech and the tech world changes quickly but some of the core functions of running a business, such as effective team communication, will not go away any time soon.
There are several reasons why they are doing well and they have much less to do with execution than with the right people getting involved.
Then we tried Slack, and it's the first time the entire team has adopted 100% and maintained it. Slack mobile has even replaced text messaging/GroupMe for a lot of us as well.
Don't hand-wave away their success by giving credit to investors. It makes you sound bitter and insecure, or at least uninformed. They've done a great job building their product and deserve the position they're in. Whether or not $2.8B is an accurate valuation is beyond me, but it does seem like they're minting money over there.
But it's not just an execution game as many would like to claim.
Nothing prevents anyone else from executing better. The permanence of the need doesn't point, in any way, to the permanence of this particular supply.
It doesn't matter if the demand doesn't go away. A higher quality supply will displace Slack, just as Slack displaced the many before it.
Using multiple devices became mainstream; nowadays everyone needs to be able to use your system from their phone and their computer at the same time. This shouldn't be hard to handle but through accidents of history it's terrible on the big open-source options (Jabber or IRC). And companies need internally-hosted. If AOL had been willing to make a self-hosted AIM, or MS a self-hosted Skype, they would've killed it.
I'm not sure why they didn't. And I'm not sure why Atlassian didn't seize the whole market with HipChat, which is almost identical to Slack (it's very marginally less polished). At my current company we use Slack's free tier because we fit within the usage limits for that but not those for HipChat, so maybe it's that?
Communication itself won't go away, but that doesn't imply that a platform/application which facilitates communication won't fade away. Just ask IRC, ICQ and AIM (All of which are still in active use today)
It's a pity that Atlassian is still napping with Hipchat usability features (particularly multiple accounts).
But tools come and go my friend
It's a completely different matter to be saying the same words in private vs in a public interview that will be read by millions of readers. A CEO must say this (or something to the general effect while being PC) when speaking in public. Doing otherwise can only have negative consequences with respect to employees, customers, etc.
We may go back to Slack at some point, if we can get it to work effectively for us.
The assumption is that if you're actively in the channel, you saw the item already and don't need a duplication notification on your phone for the item you just read.
I stopped using the desktop client for this reason and now I have a separate window open for the web client. Push works much better for me now.
The v2 Android app is currently in beta - I've been testing it for several weeks. It's lightyears ahead of the current release version which is admittedly pretty faulty (no caching means that resumes are very slow). I've also found notifications to be more reliable. Perhaps give it another try once they ship the v2 Android app.
People need to understand that investment is a vote of confidence in the team, not just the product. What can this team accomplish with that investment? That's the question.
But then, I thought the same thing about Twitter (how is this not worse that every other IRC / IM service I've ever used?) and look what happened there.
What Slack does very well is giving a good enough experience for programmers to do shop-talk, and ample opportunities for chatbot yak-shaves, it's also perfectly well usable for non technical people. I work for $ENORMOCORP, and after a couple of brave pioneers among the tech people, now everyone's falling over themselves to get their teams a Slack instance. (As others have said here, the ability to have multiple instances is pretty fundamental to this dynamic - we have team-specific Slacks, product specific, project specific and what have you. I certainly would not want some more 'old fashioned' colleagues seeing that NSFW bollocks people keep wiring into the tech specific chatbots...)
This strikes me as a pattern with some potential for growth - tech people driving adoption among non-technical colleagues. I reserve judgement on whether that's $3bn worth of potential.
I think the list will be much shorter for Slack compared to its peers.
Not to mention the integrations outside of developers. I haven't worked in enough large companies, and never as a nontechnical employee so I'm not sure what sales teams were using for communication but I doubt IRC was their cup of tea. I imagine they used a lot of email, maybe some CRM communication but that's still not as useful, or rather I imagine it's less useful than Slack. Having a single place to discuss Stripe purchases, hiring with Breezy, MailChimp et cetera that isn't a gigantic email forward sounds seriously useful and I don't know that anything like that exists on IRC.
There are alternatives like HipChat, but they clearly didn't it the mark the way Slack has.
[1] http://old.ycombinator.com/ideas.html (pg, 2008, see number 28)
(And go use Flowdock.)
Soooo time to create a Slack clone and sell it to Slack for a few million?
Ah, because I would only ever want to talk to people within my specific team...
1. Bubble when I get a direct message. 2. Leave all but about 3-4 groups. 3. Tell images to not default display (have to click on them) 4. Star important channels (The star is next to the #channelname at the top and it's only visible when hovered) That big star on the top right is not to star a channel.
5. and probably most importantly was to switch to the compressed mode so all the chat spaces are as tightly compacted as possible.
Put the 'SLACK' user on ignore and most of the annoying integrations disappear.
That said, I still hate the thing.
also this way you own the data/service for the most part.
Hipchat gets notifications right. Slack and Hall seem to have (in)sane defaults, and not quite right customizations.
The web-view of Slack is slow and stupid.
It's picky, but I loved the vim/sed style substitutions in Hipchat. Slack FTL.
But the biggest annoyance by far: In Hipchat you could reorder your chats however you felt like. In Slack they're fixed. And team chats are arbitrarily (feeling) broken up into groups and channels. Which is a completely useless distinction for most I think.
Hipchat had @all and @here. Which seem pretty self explanatory. Slack has @group, @channel, and... I guess that's it. No version of @here AFAICT, and depending on what sort of "room" you're in, the @all equivalent changes.
The iOS app also makes something that looks like a room picker and instead makes it some other menu I forget. And notifications will happily occur on my laptop, computer, iPhone and iPad all at once if I don't catch it at my desk in time. Here's a hint: If you decide to notify my phone, don't notify anything else at that point. No cat picture or CI build notification deserves Def-Con 5 treatment.
But it has themes? And useless giphy integrations? Honestly I don't get the love at all. Form over function at it's worst. I really dislike it. :-p
This seems to come about because any HipChat message to a room you are in notifies & alerts the whole room on OS X. Because of this, most communication happens in private person to person rooms which defeats the purpose of having public rooms for transparency. I haven't been able to get any of the rooms feature to stick and so what commonly happens is two people discuss things on chat, then repeat those conversations to everyone who should have been on it in meatspace.
All of this because HipChat still doesn't let you set per-room notifications.
Otherwise there'd be no point of @all and @here if you were going to be notified anyways.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7554904